The Vascular Tissue Challenge, aimed at pushing biomedical engineering forward, is offering a $500,000 prize to be shared between the first three teams to create a 1cm-thick, metabolically-functional vascularized sheet of human tissue that can be artificially controlled inside a laboratory. It's necessary that the tissue maintain at least an 86-percent survival rate of its cells over a one-month period.
"The humans who will be our deep space pioneers are our most important resource on the journey to Mars and beyond," said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA.
The results of the competition will help study health risks during long missions in space and minimize negative effects of deep space travel on future astronauts.
The research is also hoped to improve healthcare on Earth. The vascularized model can be used in pharmaceutical tests or to prompt development in organ transplants.
Some note that creating artificial tissue could be the first step toward manufacturing body parts and thence to human cloning.
